^^52/2020^^ walking

The Sunday walk is becoming quite the routine around here; it’s usually just the husband and I but one lives in hope that one of the offspring might feel ‘generous’ and grace us with their presence sooner or later. Of course it hasn’t happened yet, and to be frank, living with grown up(ish) teenagers is like running a guest house with added laundry facilities. My only consolation is karma… if it exists they will have children just like them and then we’ll talk! (how I will laugh inside…)

Anyway, this week’s talk had a touch of literature and history to spice it up: the walk began in the village of Adlestrop, near Stow on the Wold; the poet Edward Thomas wrote a beautiful poem after his train stopped at its station on a hot summer’s day:

Yes. I remember Adlestrop—
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop—only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

… through field…

… under big skies and big spaces…

and flowers…

Here the husband was trying to decide if to eat the peas looking things in the field. He did. Whatever they were, they weren’t poisonous…

We then arrived at Chastleton House, a gorgeous National Trust property, well worth a visit, when it re-opens. A lot of history and full of the original furnitures and objects.